InSight: building sandcastles on other planets
InSight is a NASA Discovery mission to explore the inner structure and the geophysics of Mars. While a seismometer (SEIS) is the main instrument of the mission to look into the interior of the planet, a thermal sensor (HP³) will be deployed to study the planetary heat flow. A part of this investigations is a characterisation of the geological and soil mechanical properties of the landing site. The HP³ instrument will use an mechanical percussion mechanism to penetrate down to five meters below the surface. A monitoring of the penetration process will be used together with a soil mechanical model to derive information of the topmost layer of regolith underneath the spacecraft. Additionally, the instrument's deployment arm will be used to perform a couple of experiments to help characterise individual parameters describing the regolith. Thus it will be possible to build sand castles while conducting scientific research on another planet.